As one of the leading CDN and DDoS protection services, Cloudflare is used by millions of websites across the globe.

This includes thousands of “pirate” sites, including The Pirate Bay, who rely on the U.S. based company to keep server loads down.

Copyright holders are generally not happy that Cloudflare is doing business with these sites. While most stop at complaining, adult entertainment outfit ALS Scan took the matter to court.

In a complaint filed at a California federal court two months ago, the company accused the CDN service of various counts of copyright and trademark infringement. ALS listed several copyright-infringing websites Cloudflare does business with, but which it allegedly failed to terminate as clients.

Yesterday, Cloudflare responded to the allegations (pdf), arguing that ALS Scan has no legal grounds to come after them. For this reason, they say the entire case should be dismissed.

Among other things, Cloudflare argues that they are not liable for contributory copyright infringement. Even if it wanted to, it couldn’t take any measures to effectively stop pirate sites from operating.

“CloudFlare is not the operator of the allegedly infringing sites but is merely one of the many intermediaries across the internet that provide automated CDN services, which result in the websites in question loading a bit faster than they would if they did not utilize CDN services.”

If Cloudflare terminated the accounts of allegedly infringing websites, the sites themselves would still continue to exist. It would just require a simple DNS reconfiguration to continue their operation.

“Indeed, there are no measures of any kind that CloudFlare could take to prevent this alleged infringement, because the termination of CloudFlare’s CDN services would have no impact on the existence and ability of these allegedly infringing websites to continue to operate,” Cloudflare writes.

As such, the company argues that it’s not “materially contributing” to any of the alleged copyright infringements.

This role puts Cloudflare on par with other third party service providers such as domain registrars and advertisers. The question of whether these services can be held liable for pirate sites is at the heart of this case.

The CDN provider further stresses that the claims for contributory copyright infringement also fail under the under the “inducement” theory.

Under the Grokster ruling, inducement would require an intentional form of advertising or messaging where the public is encouraged to infringe. This is not the case here, the company argues.

“Here, ALS has pleaded no facts regarding such a theory. Instead, ALS makes only conclusory allegations using the term inducement, devoid of any factual support,” Cloudflare writes.

“For instance, ALS Scan does not plead (as it must) facts sufficient to allege that CloudFlare solicited, advertised, promoted or rewarded acts of direct infringement by others, or that CloudFlare was created for the purpose of facilitating mass copyright infringement.”

In addition to the above, Cloudflare says that ALS fails to state proper claims other forms of copyright and trademark infringement, asking the court to dismiss the case.

Advertising network JuicyAds, which is also named in the suit, requested the same earlier this month. All parties will have a chance to defend their positions in a court hearing, after which the court will have to decide how to continue.

With theoretical damages that can run to dozens of millions of dollars and well as broad liability implications, it’s expected to become a heated fight…

Editors Notes:

I would remind you that this blog is produced free for the public good and you are welcome to republish or re-use this article or any other material freely anywhere without requesting further permission.

News & Views welcome always published as long as NO bad language or is not related to subject matter.

As the name suggests, file-sharing is all about sharing. In the old days this would be achieved by having folders full of files that anyone could take. These days, with BitTorrent’s distributed nature, it’s more about sharing content and associated bandwidth.

With that in mind, good torrent etiquette dictates that one always shares at least as much as one downloads. So, if a file is 1GB in size, it’s accepted that the user should try to share 1GB back. This is known as a 1:1 ratio. Those who upload 2GB will achieve a 2:1 ratio and those aiming for 3:1 will need to upload 3GB to others.

Generally, the more people upload the healthier the swarm, so with that in mind BitTorrent Inc. has just introduced an interesting feature to new builds of their uTorrent and BitTorrent clients. It’s called Altruistic Mode and manages to be both straightforward and somewhat confusing.

Essentially, Altruistic Mode is aimed at users who want to absolutely guarantee that they are always maintaining a 2:1 ratio (2GB uploaded for every 1GB downloaded). At first view one might think that the same goal could be achieved by downloading 1GB and letting the client seed 2GB back. However, that relies on others joining the swarm later and as mentioned earlier, Altruistic Mode wants to guarantee a 2:1 ratio, not just aim for one.

So how is this achieved? Well, in normal situations torrent clients always upload as much as they can anyway, so Altruistic Mode achieves its goals by downloading less.

The initially confusing end result here is that people who enable Altruistic Mode could find that due to their client’s insistence on maintaining a 2:1 ratio, the torrent they’re downloading might never complete. It is called Altruistic Mode for a reason and when seen in that light, the importance of a finished download places second to a healthy swarm.

BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen says that the effects of Altruistic Mode on a torrent will depend on how that torrent would behave in the same swarm in regular ‘download’ mode.

– If Download Mode would upload at a greater than 2:1 ratio then an Altruistic Mode peer will have very similar behavior.

– If Download Mode would upload at a ratio between 2:1 and 1:1 then Altruistic Mode will upload less and download a lot less than Download Mode would, resulting in a 2:1 upload to download ratio.

– If Download Mode would upload at a ratio of less than 1:1 then Altruistic Mode will do very little uploading or downloading.

“The precise definition of Altruistic Mode is that it initially downloads two pieces and after that, every time it uploads two pieces worth of data it downloads one more,” Cohen explains.

“This is a simple and reliable strategy for making sure that you never get much worse than a 2:1 ratio. It results in all the behaviors described above, which do have some technical caveats….but the essential message is right in every case.”

Cohen says that a 2:1 ratio was considered a logical choice, particularly given that a 3:1 ratio or higher has the potential to impose severe restrictions on some swarms. Ironically, if too many people decide to act selflessly and turn the feature on in the same swarm, everyone’s download may never complete.

“Going for a higher number [than 2:1] could also cause swarms to no longer have a complete copy of the file if too many peers are in Altruistic Mode, which would harm not just the one peer in Altruistic Mode but other peers as well,” Cohen explains.

“Because of this, we feel that a 2:1 ratio is a sweet spot and aren’t offering any user configuration options for it. You may get ratios of greater than 2:1 in Altruistic Mode, but in those cases you could have used regular Download Mode and gotten the same results.”

For those not familiar with how BitTorrent works (and certainly many casual users), Altruistic Mode is a bit of a head-scratcher, to say the least. And, given the prospect that a download might never complete with it switched on, it seems unlikely that swarms will be inundated with clients using the mode.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting addition to the uTorrent and Mainline BitTorrent clients and described as “an experiment” that could be further developed.

“If this goes well we may roll out another feature in the future where a peer starts out in Altruistic Mode and later switches to regular Download Mode, which would not change the upload ratio significantly but would help other peers download faster at the beginning, so peers who want to get a complete file eventually but aren’t in a rush can allow other peers who care about getting it sooner to finish first,” Cohen concludes.

Altruistic Mode is available in uTorrent 3.4.9 and above, and BitTorrent 7.9.9 and above. It is turned off by default but can be unlocked in Preferences/BitTorrent and then activated for individual torrents.

Editors Notes:

I would remind you that this blog is produced free for the public good and you are welcome to republish or re-use this article or any other material freely anywhere without requesting further permission.

News & Views welcome always published as long as NO bad language or is not related to subject matter.

After protracted deal-making with the country’s record labels, Spotify has finally launched in Japan. To sweeten the deal to prospective listeners, it’s already putting particular focus on the service’s lyric display feature — and the karaoke possibilities that (vaguely) come with that. But what’s another country in Spotify’s empire? Japan is the second largest music market in the world; Bloombergpegs it at around 300 billion yen (almost $3 billion). The country continues to sell physical music media like CDs well — it’s the country where Tower Records stores still lives on. Spotify Japan has launched both a free ad-supported service as well the typical 980 yen per-month ($9.70) subscription — it’s in invite-only beta for now.

Japan has a notable lack of free-to-listen music services, with rivals like Apple Music, Google Play and Line music only offering paid subscription options. Will Japanese listeners go for the free option, and graduate to paid? I guess it depends how annoying the ads turn out to be. The company certain needs to keep expanding. Spotify still remains unprofitable: something that success in Japan (and perhaps with Soundcloud?) could help fix…

Editors Notes:

I would remind you that this blog is produced free for the public good and you are welcome to republish or re-use this article or any other material freely anywhere without requesting further permission.

News & Views welcome always published as long as NO bad language or is not related to subject matter.

Editing a photo on Instagram doesn’t just enhance its colour and appeal; the filter you choose can reveal your mood.

A new study conducted by Andrew Reece of Harvard University and Chris Danforth of the University of Vermont, found that you can detect depression by analysing a person’s Instagram feed.

After collecting survey information and 43,950 Instagram photos from 166 volunteers recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the researchers found that people who are depressed had pictures that were “bluer, grayer and darker.”

PHOTO: WASHINGTON POST

Depressed participants in the study were also more likely to post more frequently and to apply more and different types of Instagram filters.

What was the most popular filter for people who are depressed? Inkwell, which turns colour photos into black and white.

“Healthy” participants — people the study defined as not being depressed — favoured the Valencia filter, which, the study said, “lightens the tint of photos.”

PHOTO: WASHINGTONPOST

The content of photos may also indicate depression.

“Fewer faces may be an oblique indicator that depressed users interact in smaller social settings, which would be in accordance with research linking depression to reduced social interactivity,” wrote Reece and Danforth.

Take these findings with a grain of salt, however, since they have yet to be independently reviewed and the volunteers were crowd-sourced through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which tends to attract people with a lot of free time on their hands.

Editors Notes:

I would remind you that this blog is produced free for the public good and you are welcome to republish or re-use this article or any other material freely anywhere without requesting further permission.

News & Views welcome always published as long as NO bad language or is not related to subject matter.

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